Montgomery County’s latest attempt to resurrect a sweeping carry ban is already running into the same constitutional headwinds that sank its predecessor, and the new federal lawsuit filed by Maryland Shall Issue and five permit holders shows just how little the county learned from Bruen. By layering 100-yard exclusion zones around schools, parks, and government buildings, officials have effectively turned large swaths of everyday life—grocery runs, school pick-ups, medical appointments—into criminal territory for law-abiding carriers. The plaintiffs rightly argue that these overlapping bubbles don’t merely regulate; they nullify the core right to bear arms in public for self-defense, the very protection the Supreme Court reaffirmed two years ago.

What makes Barreto v. Montgomery County especially telling is how it exposes the post-Bruen playbook now common in deep-blue jurisdictions: rewrite the statute, relabel the restrictions “sensitive places,” and dare litigants to spend years and treasure proving the obvious. Yet each new map of forbidden zones only underscores how rights become privileges when local officials get to decide where millions of residents may lawfully protect themselves. If the district court follows the Fourth Circuit’s emerging skepticism toward similar restrictions in Maryland Shall Issue’s earlier cases, the county could find its rebuilt ban dismantled before the next election cycle.

For the broader Second Amendment community, the suit is both warning and opportunity. It warns that activist counties will keep testing the limits of “historical analogues” until courts draw brighter lines, but it also offers a vehicle to force those lines into place. A decisive ruling here could narrow the definition of sensitive places nationwide, curbing the slow-motion nullification-by-zoning that threatens concealed-carry victories won at the Supreme Court.